Pot & Sports: Cannabis as Recovery – The Smokers Club

Is cannabis the new “go to” for athletes looking for alternative treatments for the litany of injuries that come from professional sports?

The first high profile incident of marijuana in sports was involving Robert Parish of the Boston Celtics. Parish was boarding a plane when a drug sniffing dog found marijuana in his bag. Parish later would say that marijuana helped him relax after games. Parish was the first to get caught but definitely not the first to light up. Athletes have been turning to marijuana for stress relief as well as and physical recovery for years. The rampant prescription of pain medicine and opioid’s as the the standard in professional sports, has been regarded as the status quo for years. Thelong term effects of CTE and traumatic injuries to the body are just now being discovered.

The saying used to be “Shake it off” well in a sense your brain doesn’t stop shaking from repetitive blows to the head, even after you leave the field. The long term effects of pain killer and opioid use as the main recovery method, are know to have lasting side effects.

Is there a safer alternative to these extremely outdated method’s of recovery?

There has to be. When so many ex-players are coming out and proclaiming that cannabis has aided them in their long term physical and mental recovery. Its hard to ignore the tangible truth. Improving areas of their life once effected by the extreme physical and mental demands of professional sports.Cannabis helps with insomnia, increased appetite, decreases respiratory rate, increases heart rate, relieves stress, and reduces anxiety. These do not sound like performance enhancing effects. So maybe its time to rethink our prohibition on cannabis in sports.

Medical cannabis is accepted in states where professional sports are played, that should warrant the use of marijuana for medical issues. The stigma of pot being a performance enhancing drug is jus not true. The effect of pot has no direct correlation with performance on the field. Where cannabis performs the best is off the field, with countless stories of athletes who have used pot to recover both physically and mentally, we can no longer allow the opinion of a few to restrict the proof of many.